Tiiny Host Alternative: Hostsmith vs Tiiny Host (2026)

I've been shipping static sites since the days when "deployment" meant FTPing a folder onto a shared LAMP box and praying the file permissions survived the trip. So when drag-and-drop hosts like Tiiny Host turned that whole ritual into a thirty-second job, I was genuinely pleased. Funny how things come full circle: we spent twenty years building elaborate pipelines, and the tool everyone actually wanted was "drop a ZIP here". But if you're searching for a Tiiny Host alternative, you've probably discovered the catch - the moment you need to send a client a password-protected preview, or put the thing on your own domain, the free ride ends and the plan ladder begins. This is an honest look at where Tiiny Host stands in 2026, what Hostsmith does differently, and which one earns your money.

Right, let's get into it. The short version for the impatient: Tiiny Host's password protection and custom domains unlock on its Solo plan at $18/month, or $13/month if you pay for the year up front. Hostsmith's Private Sites (password or email whitelist) start on the Pro plan at $15/month, which also includes 5 sites, 5 custom domains and 500 MB of storage. Everything below unpacks that, with the billing terms spelled out properly, because nothing irritates me more than comparison articles that quietly mix annual prices with monthly ones.

Why people look for a Tiiny Host alternative

People look for a Tiiny Host alternative mainly because the two features client work demands - password protection and custom domains - sit on the $18/month Solo plan, and the free tier is tight. That's the whole search intent in one sentence.

Still, let me be fair to Tiiny first, because it deserves it. Tiiny Host is genuinely good at the one thing it set out to do: you drag a ZIP, PDF or HTML file onto the page and you get a live link. No git, no build pipeline, no YAML. It supports a remarkable spread of file types - HTML, PDFs, PHP files, Office documents, images - and G2 reviewers consistently praise how quickly you can get something online without a tech team involved. The company behind it, Tiiny Labs Ltd, is registered in England and Wales and serves over a million users. It is not a scam, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

The friction starts when you try to do client work with it:

• The free tier is tight. One active project, a 3 MB upload cap (a mere 0.5 MB for PDFs), 5,000 visits a month, and a promotional banner stamped on your site. For a quick demo, fine. For a portfolio or client preview, the banner alone is a dealbreaker.
• You have to keep logging in. Free links stay online only while your account is active, which means signing in at least once every three months. Forget, and your links go dark. I've seen this bite people who hosted a one-off page and moved on with their lives.
• The features freelancers actually need sit two rungs up the ladder. Removing the banner needs the Tiny plan ($9/month, or $5/month billed annually). But password protection and custom domains - the two things you need before sending a client anything - only arrive on the Solo plan at $18/month ($13/month annually).
• Storage stays modest on paid plans. Tiny gives you 25 MB per project; Solo gives you 75 MB per project. Perfectly workable for a landing page, less so once a designer's image-heavy preview build lands in your lap.

None of this makes Tiiny bad. It just means Tiiny Host pricing funnels one specific user - the freelancer sending protected client previews - towards $13-18 a month. Which is exactly the moment to look around.

Hostsmith vs Tiiny Host at a glance

Here's the like-for-like table. Tiiny's two prices are monthly billing and annual billing (annual works out cheaper per month); Hostsmith's Pro price is a flat $15/month.

* Not quite apples to apples: Tiiny's figures are per-project upload caps (so Solo's five projects can hold up to 75 MB each), while Hostsmith's figures are total account storage shared across your sites.

A few observations, because a table without commentary is just decoration:

• If you pay annually and only need passwords, Tiiny Solo at $13/month is cheaper than Hostsmith Pro at $15. There it is, in plain text. No point pretending otherwise.
• What $15 buys you on Hostsmith is the wider package: 500 MB of storage against Solo's 75 MB per project, five custom domains included, and the email whitelist mode that Tiiny doesn't offer at any price. If you're billing month to month - which most freelancers with lumpy income sensibly do - Hostsmith Pro at $15 also undercuts Solo's $18 monthly rate.
• Both free tiers are real free tiers. Neither is a trial. Hostsmith's free sites never expire and don't require check-in logins; Tiiny's require a sign-in every three months. Both carry branding.

Sending a protected client preview: the workflow difference

The substance first: on Tiiny Solo, a protected preview means a shared password on the site; Hostsmith Pro gives you that same password option plus an email whitelist mode, which Tiiny doesn't offer on any plan. In my experience this is the actual job people are hiring these tools for. The scenario: you're a designer or freelance dev, the client build is ready for review, and you need to send a link that (a) looks professional, (b) isn't crawlable by Google or found by the client's competitors, and (c) doesn't make the client create an account or install anything.

With Tiiny's shared password, think about where that password ends up: pasted into the client's Slack, forwarded in an email thread, sitting in a shared Notion doc. Three weeks later you've no idea who has it. It's the same shared-secret problem we had with staging server .htpasswd files back in my PHP days, just with a nicer interface. (I once found a client's staging password written on a whiteboard in a photo they'd posted to their own company blog. True story, and not a fun phone call.)

Hostsmith's Private Sites add the whitelist alternative: you list the client's email addresses and only those people get in - the full mechanics are in how to password protect a website. For agency work with multiple stakeholders, that's the difference between access control and access theatre.

Then there's the domain on the link itself. Tiiny Host custom domain support arrives on Solo; Hostsmith Pro includes five custom domains. Either way, preview.yourstudio.com rather than a vendor subdomain makes the whole handoff look like it came from your studio, not from whichever tool happened to be cheapest that month. If you're sending portfolio work specifically, there's a separate walkthrough on hosting a portfolio website that covers the presentation side.

Free Tiiny Host alternatives

If you're not ready to pay anyone anything, here are the free routes I'd actually consider, with their limits spelled out:

Hostsmith Free. One site, 5 MB storage (that 5 MB is also the per-file upload cap), 5,000 visitors and 5 GB bandwidth a month, with Hostsmith branding on the page. The two things it has over Tiiny's free plan: a 5 MB cap rather than 3 MB (and no separate punitive PDF limit), and no expiry rules at all - the site stays up whether you log in or not. Same drag-and-drop workflow.

Surge.sh. Free, generous, and entirely command-line driven. You deploy by typing surge ./dist into a terminal. If that sentence reads as comfortable, it's a fine tool; if it reads as a foreign language, it isn't for you. Free SSL only covers surge.sh subdomains, not custom domains.

GitHub Pages. Free HTTPS, free custom domains, a 1 GB repository limit and a soft 100 GB monthly bandwidth cap. The catch is the workflow: everything goes through git, and on the free tier your repository is public, which means your source files are too - an odd fit for confidential client work. I've compared the options in more depth in GitHub Pages alternatives.

Netlify Drop. Genuinely friendly drag-and-drop on a capable free tier (100 GB bandwidth), though you'll need to claim the site with an account to keep it, and password protection lives behind a $20/month Pro plan (flat, unlimited seats under Netlify's 2026 credit pricing). More on that trade-off in Netlify Drop alternatives.

The pattern worth noticing: among all the mainstream options, password protection is nowhere to be found on a free tier. Vercel goes as far as charging $150/month for it as an add-on, which still astonishes me - I've covered that and the rest of its pricing in Vercel alternatives. Protected previews are a paid feature across the board; the only question is whether the rung costs you $13, $15, $18 or considerably more.

Where Tiiny Host is still the better pick

A comparison that concedes nothing is an advert, so here's where I'd point you at Tiiny without hesitation:

• Odd file types. Tiiny hosts PHP files and PHP app ZIPs natively, plus Office documents, PowerPoints and spreadsheets. Hostsmith is focused on static sites and files - HTML, PDFs, images, SPAs - and doesn't run server-side code. If your "site" is actually a small PHP script, Tiiny is one of the few drag-and-drop hosts that will run it.
• PDF tooling. Tiiny has built a proper toolkit around PDFs: PDF-to-QR-code generation, and paid options to disable downloading and printing of a hosted PDF. If your business is sending brochures, menus or decks with QR codes on printed material, that's a real feature set, not a gimmick. (I've surveyed the wider field in the PDF hosting guide; if you just need a PDF online as a clean link, how to share a PDF as a link covers the simpler cases.)
• The very cheapest banner removal. If all you want is one small unbranded site and you'll commit to annual billing, Tiiny's Tiny plan at $5/month effective is hard to argue with.

If those are your needs, stay put. Switching tools for the sake of it is a hobby, not a strategy.

Hosting a site on Hostsmith

If the protected-preview workflow is what brought you here, this is what the Hostsmith version looks like. You drag your HTML file, ZIP, PDF, images or built SPA onto the dashboard and it's live at your-site.us.hostsmith.link or your-site.eu.hostsmith.link, depending on which region you pick - the same no-ceremony upload Tiiny users are used to, covered step by step in how to host an HTML file online and drag-and-drop website hosting.

The plan ladder is short: Free for one small permanent site; Starter drops the branding and adds API and MCP access for one site; Pro at $15/month is the one most client-work folk land on - 5 sites, 5 custom domains, 500 MB storage, 100,000 visitors, and Private Sites with both password and email whitelist modes. Agencies with bigger books or EU data residency requirements move up to Agency or Premium, but for a freelancer sending protected previews, Pro is the whole story.

Frequently asked questions

Is Tiiny Host safe? Yes. Tiiny Labs Ltd is a registered company in England and Wales with over a million users, and G2 reviewers rate its support well. The question worth asking isn't whether it's legitimate - it is - but whether its plan structure fits what you need.

Is Tiiny Host free? There's a permanent free plan: one project, 3 MB uploads (0.5 MB for PDFs), 5,000 visits a month, with a Tiiny banner on the page. It's a genuine free tier, just a snug one.

Do free Tiiny Host sites expire? Free links stay online as long as your account is active, and Tiiny considers an account active if you've logged in within the last three months. Miss that window and your links can go offline. Hostsmith's free sites have no equivalent check-in requirement.

Is Tiiny Host worth it? Short Tiiny Host review verdict: a genuinely well-made tool for getting files and small sites online instantly, with unusually broad file-type support and good PDF features. Its weakness is the freelancer squeeze: the features client work demands - no banner, password protection, custom domain - are spread across paid tiers that total $13-18 a month, with modest per-project storage once you're there.

What's the best free Tiiny Host alternative? For a like-for-like drag-and-drop replacement, Hostsmith's free tier (no expiry, 5 MB, no login check-ins). For developers comfortable with git or a CLI, GitHub Pages or Surge.sh give you more headroom in exchange for more friction.

I reckon the fairest summary is this: Tiiny Host earned its million users by making hosting boring, in the best sense. But if the thing you actually do is send protected, branded previews to clients, Hostsmith Pro at $15/month buys the same five sites with 500 MB of storage against Solo's 75 MB per project, five custom domains and an email whitelist that keeps passwords out of your client's Slack entirely. That's the trade I'd make, and the one I'd have killed for back when my staging environment was a subdomain and a shared password on a whiteboard.